What a mystery this is.
Corporate taxes used to cover over 30% of government revenue, it’s 10% now. The top marginal income tax rate peaked in the 1960s at somewhere around 80% on income exceeding ~3M/year (today’s money). We’ve had 4 decades of tax cuts while the cost of delivering services has increased more or less with the inflation rate. Private equity funds now have favourable tax treatment, and stock buybacks, previously considered illegal stock manipulation is a common practice. And so on and so forth.
If you want what you had, you have to do what you did.
I’m inclined to suspect the corporate taxes covering 30 percent down to ten, is more related to an increase in government spending and increasing individual’s taxes, than cutting corporate, because, believe it or not, they tax the living shit out of businesses, much more and it’ll start to cause failures. Often times businesses that would be quite profitable just on the other side of the border, are barely making it despite comparable sales, and taxes go up tomorrow,
Corporations aren’t your friends, they aren’t going to give you any preferential treatment that they aren’t seeing the better side of.
Capital flight is also not a thing, it’s a bogeyman set up by conservatives to avoid raising taxes.
Businesses also won’t leave. Their remarkable treatment in Canada will go down to slightly less remarkable. They moan and groan and set up a whole ad campaign about how this is going to hurt the consumer but that means it’s working. And if you mean “small business” there are so so so many way ways to create exceptions or offer grants to Canadians starting or operating small businesses, where the target is larger oligopolies and conglomerates.
It’s absolutely a thing, most corporations are a couple people running a business, and capital flight is absolutely a fucking thing, Just look at the difference between Saskatchewan and Alberta over 50 years because of different tax/government policies with the same base conditions and people. And then look at Montana for a third perspective of the same base conditions. It is so tiring listening to people buy these asinine takes in complete rejection of reality.
they tax the living shit out of businesses
Yeah. It’s how we spend on keeping Canadians healthy and happy like every other happy country does. Keep up.
And TEN IS LESS THAN THIRTY like it was in the Good Old days we seemed to survive before, in those years when we built things like bridges and railways (those are the rotting, unmaintained things we non-helicopter-owning wage-slaves use) like Sweden and Denmark do to this day.
increase in government spending
TAX AND SPEND. Keep up. It’s a whole thing.
quite profitable just on the other side of the border
Unless you mean on Miquelon or Greenland, you must be talking about the border to that user-pays, fuck-the-plebes, birth-slavery, medical-bankruptcy hell to our south.
Having lived there, I fervently hope you aren’t holding that nearly-fascist mess as a goal. Alberta is cruel enough for us; let’s not go full American.
they tax the living shit out of businesses, much more and it’ll start to cause failures.
Why?
Taxes are on revenues, not gross profits. That’s why EBIT exists as a performance measure.
As a quick example of a made up corp:
Gross profits 1.1B
COGS + OpExp 1.0B
EBIT 100M
Taxes 10% (30%)
Revenues 90M (70M)
Now mom and pop barely alive
Gross profits 500k
COGS + OpExp 500k
EBIT 0
Taxes 10% (30%)
Revenues 0 (0)
Hey genius, people don’t continue on with businesses of zero net. Taxes in many provinces are at the point what would be otherwise profitable businesses aren’t worth it, that’s why you see so many abandoned. Taxes aren’t just on revenue, they’re on every aspect.
